I Learned Not All Rare Things Are Valuable, and Not All Plentiful Things Are Worthless

If you could save just one thing from a fire, what would it be? I wish I had been offered the choice

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

I was in my mid-twenties and had just gone through a bad breakup, and while I worked out what to do next, I was living out of a few suitcases at my parents’ house. It was not just me in limbo: My stuff was too. All of it—furniture, sentimental stuff, books—was packed up in a storage unit. Or at least, it had been. On New Year’s Eve of 2018, that storage unit went up in flames. Everything was gone—everything but some clothes and one brown cardboard moving box marked “RANDOM” that for some reason I had taken out of the storage unit and stashed at the back of a closet. I had no idea what was in it, and after the fire, I didn’t want to touch it. As long as it stayed taped up, I could imagine it contained anything I wanted it to.

* * *

In the months after the fire, people kept asking me what I missed the most. They often assumed it would be a big-ticket item: furniture, jewelry, kitchen appliances. It sounded like a joke when I said that actually, one of the things that had really stumped me was that I had lost this great box of hair ties that were just absolutely, completely up to the job. They laughed, thinking I was using something trivial to deflect from how cut-up I was feeling inside.

We assume that because something is cheap, or because it is plentiful, then its value is null. Some cheap things are worthless, and some expensive things are very valuable. But we should not extrapolate further.

Someone who has never jumped to that conclusion is my granny. Everything is precious to her. In her kitchen she keeps a stash of lightly used teabags in case she wants a second cup. Fish skins are kept to feed the dogs. Rips are stitched, clothes are preserved, things are used over and over again.

I went to see her recently and she told me about how she came to be so careful with the things she uses. When she was a little younger than I am now, she lived in Cardiff with my late granddad, my dad, and my aunty. They were on a strict budget, feeding four people on one salary while saving to buy a house. As a result, they owned three teaspoons. Not six, not four: just three. It was all they could afford, explained Granny. She rummaged in a dresser and brought them out. They were still in perfect condition, with barely a scratch on them fifty-five years after they were bought. It makes sense. If you could only afford three teaspoons, you would look after them.

But her post-war carefulness is at odds with the world today. In the early 1960s she could only afford three teaspoons, but, at the time of writing, you can buy four teaspoons for $3.16 at the supermarket.

In her dresser there are plenty of other things, too, including half a dozen sets of crockery. There are delicate black-and-white coffee cups, chunky blue pottery, and a beautiful brightly painted tea set, which belonged to her mother and must be the best part of a century old. Granny and her sisters jokingly called them “Uncle Cyril’s dishes” because they only came out when he was visiting. She only rarely uses these sets now, and there is at least one that she has never used at all.

These sets were total luxuries, representing months of scrimping and saving. Since then, even more effort has gone into preserving them, keeping them in near-pristine condition, to make them last a very long time.

In fact, she looks after everything in that way. If you were to give her a supermarket-bought cardigan, she could still be wearing it, with a few hand-stitched repairs, twenty years later.

When you have experienced scarcity, it is very difficult to change your mindset. Whatever you give my granny will be valued, as she has developed an ability to see how something could be useful in a pinch—not surprising, given that she’s been in a few pinches before. Her resourcefulness and dedication make me feel abashed. I bought a set of six teaspoons two years ago, but somehow I now only have five. I have no idea what happened to the sixth.

* * *

A few days after the fire, I was beginning to get tired of feeling low. My eyelids were so swollen from crying, and I was getting tetchy from sitting inside too long. I wanted to leave the house, go for a run, and let some of the sadness inside me out. I have long hair that reaches to the middle of my back, so after putting on my running gear I went to get one of the hair ties lingering at the bottom of my handbag. But there was nothing there.

I went to find the big box of hair ties that had been on my bedside table before I moved. It was a clear plastic box of five hundred neon-bright hair ties: so many of them that I used them like water. I would forget a few at the gym, lend some to friends, leave a couple on my desk at work. However many I lost, there were always more left in the box.

And so I looked for the box, but I could not find it anywhere. It was not in my suitcase nor put away in the bathroom—I realized that it must have been in the fire.

I stomped my foot like a grounded teenager, so irritated that the one thing that stood between me and my ability to get out into the sunshine and feel better was a thin piece of elastic. I had taken them for granted because they were everywhere, but, as soon as they weren’t, the value of a hair tie became very, very clear. I went to buy another box of them later in the day, by which point the light had faded and it was too dark to go out. As I scanned and paid, I thought about other things that we take for granted. We might use a plastic shopping bag only once, when it could last for years. We pack for vacation and forget our sandals, so we pick up cheap flip-flops and, when they don’t fit in our suitcase, we just leave them behind in the hotel room.

But this is all such a new thing. We used to wash and reuse tin foil, or open Christmas presents with scissors so that the wrapping paper could be used again. So why do we now treat some of the most useful things as if they’re worthless?

* * *

Inside that question, there is another one hiding. Are rare things always so special?

One day, I was sent out on a story by the newspaper I worked for. I was to look around a new bank vault that had opened to serve London’s billionaires.

I was greeted in the wood-paneled reception by a woman with a shiny blow-dry and even shinier black stilettos. Before showing me around, she gave me a security briefing, explaining the extensive lengths they went to in order to prevent break-ins. There were cameras, scanners, and sensors, but all were cleverly hidden, making the space feel like a luxury hotel—with fresh flowers at reception, grand stone fireplaces, and a patterned ceiling.

The woman led me around, showing me what they offered. The smallest spaces they had were safety deposit boxes the size of letterboxes, big enough to store passports, documents, or a necklace or two. The largest were entire rooms, which some people set up with racks to hang clothes, others filling them with antiques. Some people paid thousands of pounds a month to store their things there, but it was worth it, the woman explained. If you owned a collectible watch—one of only five ever produced—would you really run the risk of wearing it? Obviously not.

I nodded, not sure what to say.

It struck me that the vaults were in some ways a very fancy version of the storage unit I had rented, but for storing eighteenth-century marble consoles rather than pine kitchen tables. And because these people’s things were so rare, they were more valued—in every sense of the word.

* * *

That night, I came home and opened my wardrobe to put my clothes away. The cardboard box marked “RANDOM” was there, as ever. Nothing about the box was special, really, except for the fact that it was the only one I had left, and because of its rarity, I had treated it well. Whenever I opened the wardrobe, I slowly ran my hand over the top of the box, removing any dust. A corner had been dented while moving, but I had pushed the cardboard in and down, back to where it should have been.

And while it wasn’t in a vault, it somehow felt protected behind the wardrobe doors.

It had been months, and I still hadn’t opened it. A few times, I had picked it up and shaken it to see if I could guess what was inside, like a child with a Christmas present. It was difficult to make out, but there was a dry shuffling noise that could have been paper, as well as the occasional thunk of something hard hitting the side. I was deeply, deeply curious about what was inside, yet I had never opened it up to see.

That evening, as I opened the wardrobe, I once again leaned down and pushed the dust off the top of the box, then ran a fingernail along the tape sealing it, creating a neat channel between the two sides on top. I could open it now; I could count the last fragments of the past. But I knew that, once again, I wouldn’t.

The morning at the vault had rattled me a little. I wished I had been able to afford something like that; I wished my things had been kept that safe. The best I could do now was take good care of what I had left.

In the first few months, I hadn’t opened the box because I was trying to avoid any sadness that would come with finding out exactly what I had lost: something I imagined as an irreversible finish, like a title card from an old film reading “The End.” Over the months, my resolve to keep the box closed and the question open had only hardened.

Perhaps those safety deposit boxes stored priceless jewelry I could never dream of owning. But that was it; that was all they contained. A definite, finite parcel of stuff.

On one level, what I had was less than that: so limited that it fit into just one box. But my situation wasn’t just constrained; paradoxically, it was infinite too. The possible contents of that box were endless. Keeping the box closed had turned it into Mary Poppins’s carpet bag—it held any number of things.

I noticed that a corner of packing tape had peeled backward, collecting dust and fluff on its exposed sticky side, so it wouldn’t stick down again when I pushed it. I went to the kitchen, pulled a roll of tape out of the drawer, and cut a length of it with my teeth. I stuck it over the loose corner, making sure it was shut.

Excerpted from Lost & Found: Nine Life-Changing Lessons About Stuff from Someone Who Lost Everything by Helen Chandler-Wilde, published by Chronicle Books 2024

Helen Chandler-Wilde is a news and features journalist who has worked at Bloomberg, The Telegraph, and the BBC among other outlets. She studied social sciences and languages at UCL and has a master’s degree in journalism. Lost & Found is her first book.